Mission, Vision, and Values: What Do They Say?

Despite widespread recognition of its importance, very little empirical research has been conducted on strategy documents, particularly Mission or Vision statements. A database containing 489 organizational statements from 300 different organizations was analyzed via content analysis to determine how many distinct concepts could be identified and the most commonly used concepts. Statements were carefully read to determine if multiple use of a term within a single statement indicated multiple meanings. The results indicate that while traditional titles are most often used to label such statements, there is a wide variety of terms used to express the ideas contained in them. Many organizational statements contain so many unique concepts that they begin to suffer from high density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR